Thursday, April 22, 2004

Volokh on Bush's Articulateness

Eugene Volokh takes Jacob Weisberg to task for tacitly suggesting that a comment from President Bush was inarticulate:

"My job is to, like, think beyond the immediate."

After a lengthy case study of some of Weisberg's similarly coloquial comments, Volokh concludes:

    "Now I'm not trying to claim that Weisberg is generally inarticulate. His "you know"s, like some people's "like"s, are commonplace in people's conversations. Our oral comments are full of this sort of filler, and of grammar and usage errors of various sorts. Nearly anyone who has read a transcript of his own comments can tell you that.

    But given that articulate, thoughtful people like Weisberg say these sorts of things, where's the humor, the aptness, or anything else in finding instances of Bush doing the same?"


As someone who often has similar problems with non-editable locutions, I'd like to add a hearty a-a-amen.

Besides, maybe Bush was just trying to appeal to California voters...

No comments: